‘We could go from a shooter to a platformer to a horror theme’: How stepping away from Payday 2’s real-world framing has helped Den of Wolves turn high-stakes heisting on its head

By the developer’s own ission, Den of Wolves is driven by its creators’ past experiences working on the Payday series. After all, 10 Chambers’ follow-up to GTFO is indeed a co-operative heist ‘em up. Each high-stakes excursion balances heart-in-mouth stealth and backs-to-the-wall chaos with fine precision, wherein choosing the right identity-hiding mask and distinct weapon loadout carry the same weight.

Where Den of Wolves strays from the path carved by its spiritual forerunners, however, is in its sci-fi trappings: More specifically, its use of ‘dives’—tears in reality that transport players from its central Midway City setting to a different plain of existence between heists. When the PC Gaming Show travelled to 10 Chambers headquarters in Stockholm to chat all things Den of Wolves, the studio’s creative director and CEO Ulf Anderson described these instances as “neural heists” that are essentially man-made defence mechanisms injected into people’s minds.

As seen in our exclusive behind the scenes interview above, master artist and co-founder Anders Svard added: “The dives provide a change of pace and change of intensity in the gameplay and change of scenery. And it could be a nightmarish sort of abstract thing. Imagine trying to navigate a forest or something like this. But it could also be a Japanese temple or a fortress in the Swiss Alps.

“We could just mix a lot of different stuff together because it's this very abstract place. And also with gameplay, we could go from a shooter to a platformer to a horror thing. Or we can have a sort of parkour experimentation where you can run on walls. We make the rules for what the dives are and what they can be.”

And so while sharing the familiar first-person four-player co-op heist DNA of the likes of Payday 2, Den of Wolves poses something that will, at times, be entirely unrecognisable from 10 Chambers’ previous experience. The dives will ultimately facilitate freedom dev-side, in visual art and gameplay design, while providing a degree of fluidity in narrative , given the fact it appears entering dives can happen without much warning.

One area where Den of Wolves will reflect its genre predecessors, though, is its use of masks. On this, Anderson said: “We want to motivate you to keep playing and also, like, what are we stealing and what's the economy of the game? And I'm not talking about getting people to spend more cash. It's: what's the drive of the game? And I think building new things or crafting things is a very interesting area. A good example would be like this thing we did for Payday where you would craft masks"

Svard added: “Yeah, we're going back to the masks. I've heard people tell me before like, oh, GTFO and then all this. It's a masks game, right? I'm like, really? Yeah, maybe it is. So as with the dives, you can basically make anything. The masks are this expression to allow them to expand the world inside of themselves.”

If any of that gives you a hankering for heisting, you can wishlight Den of Wolves on Steam right now.

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